RE: [nv-l] Master Map

[Brian Kraftchick <Brian.Kraftchick@odfl.com>]

Bob,

 

I was following this thread somewhat and just had a quick question about something you mentioned in your reply below.  How did you go about setting up a ruleset that automatically unmanages anything that is not in certain SmartSets.  I realize this my be an elementary question, but I am still a bit "green" with Netview and just found that a really useful idea.  I have thus far used the "elimination" entries in our seed file to get the discovery process to ignore particular ranges of ip addresses...but I have yet to get it completely accurate.  As I am working towards a "Production" map that our call center can use, I continue to discover, re-edit the seed file, dump the database, and re-discover....but as you might imagine, there always seems to be something I didn't catch.  The automated "unmanage" idea sounds like something that I think we could benefit from.

 

Thanks!

Brian

-----Original Message-----
From: Quinn, Bob [mailto:Bob_Quinn@sra.com]
Sent: Monday, November 01, 2004 12:19 PM
To: nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com
Subject: RE: [nv-l] Master Map

Thanks James, and to everyone else who replied.  Ultimately there will be central site control.  We're consolidating from over 100 Data Centers to 10 and there will be two NOC's.  Currently there is no NOC.

 

A consultant previously came in and did set up two redundant boxes that managed the whole network.  They spent a great deal of effort creating very intricate seed files and location files.  The problem is the network changes frequently and no one was keeping these up.  In a very short time no one was using NetView at all.

 

The network is distributed all over the US with a lot of slow links in a cascading hub and spoke design.  Some locations can have as few as 10 devices.  Bandwidth is a big problem so the goal has been to distribute the polling and only send up significant events to TEC.  So far, only one of the 10 regions has been partially set up.  NetView is allowed to discover everything but then a ruleset is used to unmanage anything that is not in the Cisco Devices, Tivoli Objects or Server SmartSet.  The Server SmartSet is created by hostname (all servers start with "sv").  In the end there will probably be about 4000 devices being monitored enterprise wide.

 

The intent is to automate as much as possible and minimize network traffic.  I wasn't recommending a master map but was given marching orders to investigate its feasibility.  I think either a central NetView or having multiple web clients in the NOC to view the regional NetViews might make more sense.

 

Thanks again

 

Bob

---

From: owner-nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com on behalf of James Shanks
Sent: Mon 11/1/2004 8:54 AM
To: nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com
Subject: Re: [nv-l] Master Map

There have been some good replies to this issue, but I haven't yet seen anyone else ask what I take to be the pertinent questions.

(1) What 's the point?  Are you planning on instituting central site control or does your home office just want to know what's going on in the regions, without having to ask?  Is this supposed to be for backup or just information?
(2) Have you considered a low-overhead alternative, like having multiple web clients, each connected to a remote region?  Each of those regions could even make a separate map for you with only the pertinent devices managed and everything else unmanaged.  Call it the "headquarters map".  That's a lot easier to implement, I think, than the programming you are proposing, unless you are not using web clients at all.
(3) How big a box can you get for this?  That's a key issue here I think, because that may well determine what we can do.  I'm presuming that you were planning to have this master NetView on a separate machine.
(4) Of the 4000 nodes at each of the ten locations, how many actually fall into the class of those you want to monitor -- servers, switches, and routers?   Knowing that will allow you to figure out the minimum size box you'll need, memory-wise.  There are sizing rules in the books so you can match the hardware you have to what has been found in the past to be minimally  sufficient.

Consider this.  40,000 nodes is not out of the question for NetView to manage from one machine, given that he has good connectivity and a big enough box,  with lots of memory and at least a four-way processor.   So your central location could just start with a location.conf file to partition out the ten regions, and  go from there.  If your regions have their own location.conf files, you could just import those into the new one, and turn netmon loose.   Just ten good seeds, a router from each region, and he ought to discover most of the whole thing in a just a couple of days or so.

My view is basically that you'd better off with a real central NetView rather than one which is just a shell.  Even if that turns out to be infeasible from a performance view, you could populate the database initially by letting netmon do it, rather than loadhosts.  It's easier to unmanage or even delete what you don't want than to load it.  Then you can try a sample our ruleset and update script  and see how it works.  The idea of having a shell master NetView is not one which has been studied, so far as I'm aware, so it's not clear to me that you can get much help determining in advance how feasible it is,  unless by chance, someone else has already done it.

James Shanks
Level 3 Support  for Tivoli NetView for UNIX and Windows
Tivoli Software / IBM Software Group

"Quinn, Bob" <Bob_Quinn@sra.com>
Sent by: owner-nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com

10/29/2004 02:11 PM

Please respond to
nv-l

To	<nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com>
cc
Subject	[nv-l] Master Map

Excuse the newbie question but ...

I have a co-worker who is not a NetView expert who would like me to make NetView do something it is not designed to do.  I'd like to tell him he's nuts.

We will have several NetView installations (7.1.4 FP2 AIX 5.1) in different regions across the US each discovering and monitoring devices only in its own region (about 4000 nodes per region - 10 regions total).  He believes there must be a way to create a master map that does not do its own discovery or polling (disabled in Options  Topology/Status Polling) but is fed from the regional NetViews.  If a regional NetView discovers a device and it is a router, switch or server (controlled by SmartSets) he proposes it send a trap to the master console that will then execute a script  that runs loadhosts and adds the device to the master map.  He also proposes that status changes detected by the regional NetViews initiate traps to the master and change the status on the master map.  I've read James info that was posted a while back on changing the status of an icon.  While each individual piece of what my coworker is proposing seems techically feasible on the surface, the solution as a whole doesn't seem practical to me.

So which one of us is nuts?

Thanks

Bob
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